Despite all the attention, the strategy of "john shaming" is far
from unique. It's just one of several tactics city and county
police departments across the country routinely use to target the
men who pay for sex, rather than the women who sell it.

Michael Shively of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, research firm
Abt Associates has spent the past several years gathering loads
of information about strategies that aim to reduce the "demand"
side of prostitution.

Shively and his colleagues have compiled a database of at least
825 cities that employ at least one of these tactics.

Shively's work has shown that targeting demand can be much more
useful than arresting the so-called "supply" side of
prostitution: the women themselves, or the pimps trafficking sex.

Most communities begin by sweeping the streets for the suppliers
of sex, but ultimately find the approach ineffective, he says.
The women are often victims themselves who've been forced into
the trade for various reasons, and the pimps are easily
replaceable once they're taken off the street.

"Focusing on the supply, the supply of sellers of commercial sex,
is not found to be effective," says Shively. "Police never find
it to have any lasting or substantial effects other than
short-term displacement or moving the problem around."

Isolated anti-john initiatives date back to the early 20th
century, says Shively, but the trend really took off in the 1970s
when groups began calling for equal enforcement of prostitution
laws.

Since that time a number of strategies have emerged: from the
"reverse sting" (undercover female officers solicit buyers) to
"john schools" (programs designed to educate men about the risks
of prostitution) to shaming. Shively's latest D.O.J. report
charts the first cities of anti-demand:

Shively credits St. Petersburg, Florida, for implementing some of
the strongest early programs, back in the mid-70s, aimed at both
reducing demand for prostitution and providing social support for
female victims of it.

A pioneering john school started by San Francisco in 1995 reduced
recidivism rates by nearly half, Shively reports, and became a
global model for other cities.

A sustained program of reverse stings in Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania, established in the mid-1980s, led to a 75 percent
decline in prostitution.

Other cities have turned to shaming because it's much cheaper
than running schools or deploying undercover
officers. Several
places in addition to Kennebunk publicize names of johns
on billboards, over the internet, or through press releases.

There are legitimate ethical concerns about the tactic — some
argue that it unfairly maligns men who haven't yet been convicted
of a crime — but from an effectiveness standpoint, police
interviews and community surveys suggest it's a strong behavioral
motivator.

"Cities have gotten themselves into position to pursue these
tactics for many different reasons," says Shively. "In some
cases, it's been a nonprofit organization that maybe heard
something or was looking for something. … In other cases the
police have said, what we're doing isn't working, what else is
out there."

Cook County, Illinois, which encompasses Chicago, is doing the
best overall job targeting demand today, says Shively. The county
is part of a wider statewide anti-demand campaign
called End
Demand Illinois, driven largely by the Chicago Alliance
Against Sexual Exploitation, with an aim to shift the attention
of law enforcement onto patrons, not prostitutes, and create
support networks for victims.

Nashville, Tennessee, also deserves praise for its aggressive
john school, he says, which generates about $100,000 a year for
survivors.

Budget is a major obstacle for some cities when it comes to
fighting prostitution, but criminal priority is also significant,
says Shively.

Some police departments or district attorneys choose not to
emphasize the crime because it's only a misdemeanor instead of a
felony. Still many officers recognize that most of the felonies
targeted by cities — from weapons offenses to murders — are found
in high concentrations around prostitution rings.

"Police that connect the dots and that connect all the crimes
together, they think it's time well spent to focus on
prostitution," says Shively. "They know they don't get anywhere
with supply and distribution, so the ones that are consistently
aggressive about demand see that they're attacking the market
that drives many of their other problems."

Shively hopes DEMANDForum will give cities the information they
need to pursue whatever tactic they deem best for them. (The site
is live but still being updated, he says, with an official public
release planned for the coming weeks.) He's especially hopeful
that some places will be able to learn from the efforts of
others.

Cities that have given up on john schools because they couldn't
get support from a district attorney, for instance, might follow
the lead of Waco, Texas, where program leaders turned to the city
attorney instead.

"One of the reasons we put the information together was so that
people would not have to reinvent wheels if they're interested in
a wheel," he says. "We want to make the information about what
communities have done accessible, so others can get new ideas
they haven't thought of, or find solutions to problems that have
been solved elsewhere."